Best-selling author and renowned religious scholar Karen Armstrong presents a concise and articulate history of Islam, the world's fastest-growing faith. Beginning with the Prophet Muhammad's flight from Medina and concluding with an examination of modern Islamic practices and concerns, Armstrong delivers an unbiased overview. She contends that no religion is more feared and misunderstood by the Western world as Islam, and firmly challenges the notion...

"With over 19 million copies in print and a remarkable record of #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestsellers, Bill O'Reilly's Killing series is the most popular series of narrative histories in the world. Killing the Witches revisits one of the most frightening and inexplicable episodes in American history: the events of 1692 and 1693 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. What began as a mysterious affliction of...

"Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history"-- Provided by publisher. The 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history. On May 31 and June 1 an armed mob looted homes and businesses as Black families fled. The police did nothing...

On September 17, 1787, 39 delegates signed the Constitution of the United States into law. These four pages of rules would define how the United States government worked and serve as the foundation for all the rights that we enjoy today. This colorfully illustrated story takes kids on a journey through the writing of the Constitution, how it was amended with the Bill of Rights, and the ways it still shapes life in the United States.

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. This book takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made a triumphant...

"In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian ... Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore's groundbreaking investigation places truth itself--a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence--at the center of the nation's history. The American experiment rests...

On May 5, 2007, two days into his twenty-seventh trip to the Boundary Waters, Stephen Posniak found a perfect spot on Ham Lake and set about making a campfire. Over the next two weeks, the fire he set would consume 75,000 acres of forest and 144 buildings. More than one thousand firefighters would rally to extinguish the blaze, at a cost of 11 million dollars. Gunflint Burning is a comprehensive account of the dramatic events around the Ham Lake fire,...

The twentieth century is usually seen as "the century of total war." But as the historian David Bell argues in this landmark work, the phenomenon actually began much earlier, in the era of muskets, cannons, and sailing ships-in the age of Napoleon. In a sweeping, evocative narrative, Bell takes us from campaigns of "extermination" in the blood-soaked fields of western France to savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities to central European battlefields...

Read here the storied history of these United States. The stories in this book are part of what Abraham Lincoln called the 'mystic chords of memory.' They are the symbols that define the essence of the United States, that mark its historic course, and connect its people. The American Patriot's Almanac is a daily source of inspiration and information about the history, heroes, and achievements that sum up what this nation is all about.

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1998" Derek Sayer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He is the author of several books, including (with Philip Corrigan) The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline-a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although...